Chapter 18 – No Funnies

"What the hell's going on?" Jack Harkness demanded to know as he reached the flats two minutes after a hysterical phone call from Rose. The entire building was on fire now, completely consumed by flames... And the sirens seemed so far away.

"I dunno how it started, I just saw it and it got out of control..." Rose replied, talking at about 100 miles per hour and staring at the entrance door to the flats anxiously.

Jack instinctively did a head count of people... Rose, Jackie, Penelope, Leah, Alex and Tony. "Where's..."

But just as he was about to ask, Rose squealed and pointed as someone ran out of the building. But as they became closer and closer she very quickly realised it was Ulysses, and her temporary relief was very quickly overwritten with the original panic.

Ulysses reached them all, gasping for air and looking around the crowd with Mr Tibbles struggling in his arms. "Where's Theta?" he asked anxiously. "He was right in front of me!"

Rose stared at him in disbelief, and instantly tears erupted in her eyes.

"He hasn't come out, yet?" Jack asked quickly.

"No," Rose sobbed. "Something's wrong, I can feel him screamin'... Oh God, I've gotta find him," she said, making to go into the building but Jack stopped her.

"Rose, stay back," he ordered. "And give me your scarf."

"What?" she gasped in a sob as Jack took her scarf from her neck and wrapped it over his nose and mouth.

"I'm going in," he told her, then with absolutely no hesitation he ran straight into the burning building.

The entire block of flats was consumed in fire and smoke as Jack pushed his way through, his eyes stinging whilst trying to keep low at all times. He scrambled up the first flight of stairs, checking at all times for the Doctor – but he couldn't see him. He continued upwards, practically throwing himself up and through the walls of fire. He'd lost his survival instinct long ago – he was immortal, only the Doctor mattered.

He managed to get up three flights of stairs before he only just about managed to dodge a piece of the infrastructure caving inwards. The entire building was falling down around his head...

Then he caught sight of a hand. A hand covered with blood and ash, poking around the corner of the next flight of stairs. Whether it was the Doctor or not, suddenly it didn't matter. It was a person, and they needed his help.

He navigated his way over debris to clamber to the top of the stairs on all fours. He could hear sirens outside now, muffled by the roar of the fire. He reached the top of the stairs, and came across the body the hand belonged to.

It was the Doctor, lying unconscious halfway down the stairs, as though he'd fallen. Jack struggled to focus through his streaming eyes, managing to kneel next to the Doctor and scrambled for a heartsbeat.

He was still going, and Jack breathed a sigh of relief. With no hesitation he slipped his arms underneath the Time Lord, his body limp and unrelenting as he lifted him up to carry to safety...

Rose watched anxiously from outside, tears falling down her face as her Mum hugged her in comfort.

"He'll be all right," she kept telling Rose. "He'll be all right."

Her words were doing nothing to comfort her. She looked up at the burning building, seconds feeling like hours as the firemen began to fight the well out of control blaze.

Then a figure appeared in the doorway, carrying the body of another. She had to really fight the urge to run forward as the figure got closer... and was instantly drowned in paramedics and firemen.

She ripped from her mum's grip, running towards them and shoving her way through the crowd to try and get to them.

She saw the Doctor lying on the ground surrounded by paramedics. Someone tried to hold her back but she just screamed at them to let her through until she reached the Doctor, taking his head in both hands.

"Oh god, oh god," she muttered, trying to brush his hair back and getting a palm stained with pure black soot. "Doctor, Doctor wake up..."

He wasn't moving an inch. As a paramedic moved forward to check his breathing Martha suddenly appeared, striding through the crowd as Rose had done with an air of authority.

"I am Martha Jones, Doctor for UNIT, I am taking control of the treatment this patient," she said sternly with her ID in the air as they all looked at her with an incredible amount of dislike. "Anything you administer, blood, drugs, anything, take it through me. If you want to wrap a bandage around him, ask me first. If you even breathe on him, you had better tell me or you'll be fired quicker than you can say, 'but!'... Got it?"

"Yes, ma'am," the paramedics affirmed in unison.

"Good. Let's stabilise the breaks I can see in his legs, treat him for shock and get him into the ambulance," she ordered.

"Martha," Rose croaked, now utterly having lost all of her fight and just standing there paralysed as the paramedics shifted the Doctor onto a stretcher.

"Come in the ambulance," Martha told her. "The Doctor's parents can look after Leah and Alex, yes?"

Rose nodded numbly, glancing at them gathered over by the wall. Tears were streaking down Penelope's face as she held Leah, but that was all she got to see as she was ushered into the ambulance.

Martha sat her down beside the Doctor, where she scrambled for his hand. Tears were still falling, so she scrunched up her sleeve and wiped at her eyes.

"See if you can get through to him through the bond," Martha told her.

Rose nodded silently, taking a breath and looking down at him, struggling not to cry even more. She pressed her fingers to his temple, concentrating to see if she could hear anything.

Nothing.

Doctor. She thought hard, throwing love through the bond. It had worked once before, it might work again... Doctor, please wake up.

But he didn't.

Time had become irrelevant. Rose saw the little hands on the clock move around the circle with numbers on but the positions of the hands had absolutely no significance to her whatsoever.

She was just waiting, waiting for Martha to come and talk to her. She was no doctor but even Rose could tell things were bad this time. Very bad. She had no desire to see the Doctor regenerate again but she had already accepted the fact that regeneration may be their only option. But she would see it through with him. Even if he didn't regenerate, even if the smoke inhalation had given him brain damage and he ended up dribbling in a wheelchair calling her Fanny then she would take care of him, for the rest of her life if she had to. Because even after five years of being together, having the occasional fights just before going to sleep and the obligatory glares and silences over the breakfast table, she was still as helplessly in love with him as she had been when she first met him at the age of 19. She was 25 now. Or was she 24? Maybe 26. She didn't even know her own age anymore, but however long it had been the years had just flown by.

So time went on. In that time Jack had called to tell her Leah and Alex were tucked up in bed, and to see if he could get any news. She hadn't had any to give him. He'd offered to come to the hospital but she had politely rejected his offer. She just wanted to see the Doctor, now. She wanted to hold his hand, listen to his heartsbeat and kiss him forever.

It was 1am when Martha appeared again, surgical mask over her face. She caught sight of Rose sitting in the same chair she'd been in when Martha had left. She pulled down her mask as she made towards Rose, and took a seat next to her.

"Rose," she said gently, startling her friend out of a daydream. "How are you?"

Rose ignored the question. "Is he... Is he..." She couldn't even bring herself to finish the end of that sentence.

"No, he's not dead," Martha said quickly. "I'm not going to lie, Rose, things aren't good. He's suffered severe smoke inhalation causing internal burns in his lungs and throat. Oxygen deprivation may have harmed his brain and he's breathed in a lot of carbon monoxide. He's got some deep burns and both of his legs are broken and we may get an infection. I'm going to try all that I can, but..."

"Just... don't finish that sentence," Rose interrupted, holding up a hand.

"Okay, but I'm just warning you. If he was a human, he'd have been dead hours ago."

"I know."

"Give it twenty minutes then you can see him, we're going to move him into intensive care."

Rose had spent the entire night with him, just holding his hand, watching his chest rise and fall, listening to the heart-rate monitor. She became increasingly more and more paranoid that the beeping was suddenly going to stop, but thankfully it didn't.

Her husband had a few burns, some mild, and some heavily bandaged. He had a few bruises, he looked very pale and his legs were both in casts, and in traction – but beyond that he seemed fine externally. Though she knew most of the damage was internal. She just wished he'd wake up and give her a wink, then go back to sleep again. Just to assure her that he was going to get better.

When Jack had arrived at 9am she had finally resigned to leave the Doctor to go home and get some sleep, leaving Jack to watch him just in case he woke up.

"He's looks like crap," Jack muttered seriously to Martha when she got in at 11am to check him.

She didn't reply to that verbally, just nodded, running a few checks and topping up his IV lines.

"How bad is it? Really?" Jack asked.

Martha swallowed, looking at him. "Well..."

"The truth."

"... We might be getting used to his new face tomorrow."

Jack couldn't find the words to reply to that, just reaching up to brush back the Doctor's hair.

"I can't order any scans that might help," Martha confessed quietly. "He's an alien in an alien-fearing world and if anyone, absolutely anyone sees his scans they'll start a riot, and he'll be in trouble. No amount of confidentiality can hide that short of getting the whole of UNIT over here."

Jack thought about that. "How about we move him back to the TARDIS?"

Martha quickly shook her head. "The move would kill him, Jack. He can't go anywhere."

"We can't just sit here!" Jack protested.

"I know, I know," Martha said quickly, hand on her head. "If things look worse tomorrow I'll risk it, but not until I absolutely have to."

Jack fell into silence again, staring at the Doctor's face. His eyes were still bruised.

"Do we know how the fire started?" Martha suddenly wondered.

Jack shrugged. "No idea. There's no trace of anything either accidental or deliberate. The police'll want to speak to Rose when she's ready."

"Was anyone else injured?"

Jack shook his head.

"Well that's something," Martha supposed, looking at the Doctor again. "He'd be happy with that."

"This isn't fair," Jack muttered. "Not on him, not on Rose, or his parents, or Leah or Alex... Not with everything that's been going on recently."

"They've had more than their fair share of bad luck," Martha agreed, then thought for a moment and frowned. "But..."

"What?" Jack asked, looking up.

"You found him... How d'you think he broke his legs?" Martha asked seriously.

"He must've fallen," Jack assumed.

"With Gallifreyan bones?" Martha queried. "Doesn't sound right."

"There was a lot going on," Jack said, shrugging. "When I found him he was lying in a heap halfway down the stairs, head first. It looked like he fell."

"Just seems a little weird to me..." Martha confessed. "And what about the bruises on his neck? How did he get them?"

"What are you suggesting?"

"I don't know," Martha said quickly, sighing. "But... None of this really fits. Never mind. I'm probably leaping to conclusions."

Rose woke up at 6pm after Penelope had given her a special Venusian monk concoction to help her sleep. After she woke up she told Ulysses and Penelope what had happened, then went to get Leah and Alex to tell them the news. She got them both into the living room on the sofa, then sat on the table opposite, smiling as best she could, but she couldn't help her eyes watering slightly at the corners.

Leah pounced on that immediately. "Is Daddy dead?" she asked quietly.

"No," Rose replied quickly, wiping at her eyes and struggling not to smudge her eye make up. "He's okay."

Leah and Alex stared at her, their eyes shining, gazing up at her with such hope. She had to be straight with them. She and the Doctor had always been adamant about that.

"Daddy is very, very badly hurt," she began, hearing her voice tremble slightly. "He's never been this badly hurt before, not even... Well, not even last year. And when Time Lords are really hurt, if they can't get better... Then there's this thing called... regeneration." Rose could hear herself talking, but what she was saying didn't seem real at all. "You might be able to do it too when you're older. Daddy's done it once before while I've known him, to save himself he completely renewed all his cells... and he changed his face – his entire body. He used to have big ears and blue eyes."

"What might he look like?" Leah asked quietly.

"There's no way of knowin'. He could be blonde, he could be short, he could have green eyes or be a bit fat," Rose replied, smiling slightly. "But even if he changes, his personality might change but he will still love all of us."

"Is Daddy gonna regenerate, then?" was Leah's next question.

Rose looked at them both, their son, their daughter, two pairs of eyes brown and blue staring up at her sadly. Leah looked worried, but Alex didn't seem to have an expression.

"Not necessarily. This is only if he finds gettin' better too hard to do. But you know your Dad, he's really strong and he'll fight this all the way. Regeneration is always the last resort."

Leah nodded slowly. Alex was still just staring.

"Do you wanna ask me anythin'?" Rose asked.

"Are we gonna go see him?" Leah wondered.

Rose nodded. "We're gonna get somethin' to eat and then Uncle Jack's gonna take us to the hospital."

Leah just nodded, and Alex continued to stare. His expression gave nothing away, but Rose was positive he'd understood every word.

A/N: Thank you for all the comments, it really does mean a lot :)